Ever wondered why some things become popular, and other don't? Why some products become hits while others flop? Why some ideas take off while others languish? What are the key ideas behind viral marketing? This course explains how things catch on and helps you apply these ideas to be more effective at marketing your ideas, brands, or products. You'll learn how to make ideas stick, how to increase your influence, how to generate more word of mouth, and how to use the power of social networks to spread information and influence. Drawing on principles from his best-selling book, "Contagious: Why Things Catch On," Professor Jonah Berger illustrates successful strategies for you to use buzz to create virality so that your campaigns become more shareable on social media and elsewhere. By the end of this course, you'll have a better understanding of how to craft contagious content, build stickier messages, and get any product, idea, or behavior to catch on.

VP

Very useful course. I had already read the whole book "Contagious" so it helped me a lot before actually starting this online course. The material is very intersting and filled with useful insights.

RS

Aug 04, 2016

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Very interesting subject! There's science behind all viral contents. It's not the luck. Very easy to understand and put into practice. Best teacher I've ever learned with. Love this course so much!

From the lesson

What Makes Ideas Sticky?

In this module, you'll start to learn what makes products, ideas, and behaviors contagious; in other words, why they catch on. You'll explore the science behind why some things become popular while others fail. You'll also discover the key principles, or six SUCCESs” factors that make messages stick. Finally, you'll learn how to make any idea more memorable, whether it’s a pitch to your boss or a lesson you want students to remember.

Taught By

Jonah Berger

Marketing Professor

Transcript

Now we'll talk about why some ideas stick and others don't. So you may have heard that you only use 10% of your brain. You might have heard that wearing a seatbelt can increase your risk of death. Or you may have even heard that Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to KFC because it isn't chicken. Now, if you think about those three things, most of us have heard at least one of them. I've done this a few times. Almost everybody's heard that KFC changed its name to KFC because it wasn't really chicken. Some people have heard that wearing your seatbelt increases the risk of death. But why have we heard these things? Why have some things stick in memory while others don't? And what's interesting about these three particular things is that they're not true. They're all false. Yet we've all heard them and we've all remembered them. And so one important question is, well why do even false things stick in memory while some true things don't? And how can by understanding why false things succeed, we design true things to be more successful? In thinking about why things stick, it's important to think about the idea of natural selection. And you may have heard about natural selection with the beak of the finch, the famous example from Charles Darwin. The idea there was very simple. Different finches have different beaks. Some have longer beaks. Some have narrower beaks. Some have wider beaks. Some have shorter beaks. And certain finches have better fit with their surrounding environment. Depending on that year if there are more seeds or more ants that need to be eaten, finches that have certain sorts of beaks will be better rather than others. The same thing with giraffes. Why do giraffes have a long neck? Well, other animals could reach the low-down food. Giraffes had longer necks could reach the higher-up food and so they ended up being more successful. Certain animals fit better with their environment and are more likely to succeed and have kids and those genes are passed on. Variations, selection, and retention. We can think about those same ideas of variation, selection, or retention and apply them to our own ideas in the world around us. Take variation. Well, certain stories are longer versus shorter. Certain stories have more emotion versus less emotion. And it turns out that that variation impacts whether those stories or those ideas succeed. The selection mechano isn't food. It's us. It's based on how those ideas fit with our memory. As we'll talk about, certain ideas fit better with the way we're designed, and as a result those ideas stay in our memory and get more likely to be transmitted later on. The same thing is true for all sorts of ideas. Whether it's a long message or a short one, whether it's a piece of online content or a video we saw, whether it's a speech we might make in front of others, all these things are selected on by the environment to determine whether or not they succeed. And so here we'll talk about a recipe for making ideas stick, essentially a set of ingredients that you can add to any piece of content or idea you're building to make them more likely to be remembered. How can we get consumers to remember our ads or our messages? How can we get our kids to remember to take out the trash? Or how can we get our employees to remember an important initiative that we're supposed to be doing this year? These tools will help us think about how to make these messages stick more effectively. And, in fact, to help us, they're part of a framework. It's called SUCCESs and that's an acronym that stands for Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories. We'll talk about each of these in turn and talk about how we can use them to get our messages to stick.

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